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How Smoking Affects Pregnancy

Health studies show that smoking can affect your heart as well as your lungs. Smoking also raises your risk for certain cancers. While you are pregnant, smoking affects your unborn child. It reduces oxygen and blood flow to your baby. This may cause bleeding problems that can put your pregnancy at risk, or even cause miscarriage or stillbirth.

How smoking affects your baby

When you smoke during pregnancy, you put your baby’s health at risk. Any or all of the problems below are more likely to happen:

Your baby is more likely to be born too soon (premature birth). When that happens, your baby’s lungs and other organs may not be fully formed.

Your baby could have a low weight at birth. That does not make delivering the baby easier. In fact, a low-birth-weight baby is at greater risk during labor.

Your baby could have breathing problems, like asthma or allergies.

Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of infantile colic and childhood obesity.

Facing facts

While you’re pregnant, you are breathing for both you and your baby. When you smoke, your breathing becomes shallow and your lungs fill with smoke. Then you and your baby get less air. Cigarettes also fill your body with chemicals, like nicotine and tar. These get passed on to your baby.

Carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke takes the place of oxygen in your blood. It passes to your baby through the bloodstream.